🤰🏾Motherhood

“I believe that all women , but especially housewives, tend to think in lists; I have always believed, against all opposition that women think in logical sequence, but it was not until I came to empty the pockets of my light summer coat that year that I realized how thoroughly the housekeeping mind falls into the list pattern, how basically the

My life as a parent seems to come at the storytelling problem differently. The experience crowds out the narration, rather than the other way around. What is there to say about omnipresence? There’s a tactility to parenting (feeding, cleaning, dressing, hugging, rocking, kissing), a primitive quality (love, protection, devotion), that resists... See more

Writing

What I want to say is this: The reason I’d do this to myself is because I want messy. And I’m greedy. And I want another one because four makes me feel neat. Neat is so unfamiliar it makes me feel homesick, but creating messiness is like making it right. Because even though there will be less of the good things, like sleep, time, sex and money,

Clover Stroud • My Wild and Sleepless Nights: The brave, raw Sunday Times bestselling memoir

Tillie Olsen wrote: “In the twenty years I bore and reared my children . . . the simplest circumstances for creation did not exist.” It was a physical problem, a time problem; it was also a question of selfhood. “The obligation to be physically attractive and patient and nurturing and docile and sensitive and deferential . . . contradicts and must

Julie Phillips • The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem

“Perhaps the least visible but most pervasive job is that of household manager. “That one is constant,” Smock says. “It’s the person who remembers everything: that Joey needs to have a dentist appointment, what foods each child likes, that a babysitter needs to be hired for the weekend. If a mother is handing her husband a grocery list, he is given... See more